God's call to care for the world's orphans

I was doing my daily check of Ethiopian adoption blogs and came across an interesting fact in a post that is circulating.  Here it is:

• There are 132 million orphans in the world, according to UNICEF.
  
• There are roughly 2 billion people who consider themselves Christians in the world.
  

If all 2 billion believe in Christ as their Savior then all are adopted:

For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.  For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"  The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God,  and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.

Romans 8:14-17

Therefore, if only 7% of Christians chose to adopt ONE child, all 132 million of the world's orphans would have a permanent home! 

 But wait...it gets better, if only THREE (yep, you read that 

correctly, 3%) of the world's Christians adopted ONE child, all adoptable orphans would have a permanent home and a forever family. That's all it would take!  

While I firmly believe that not everyone is called to adopt – Christian or not – I do believe that, at the very least, 3% of 2 billion Christians have been given this calling, especially since scripture defines the mark of pure Christianity as caring for orphans!  It's simply a matter of obeying the call and returning the enormous gift of adoption that God has given us to a child who needs a home.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.

James 1:27a.

God's Amazing Grace

Our family has been blessed with all the many people God has graced our lives with. At our new church, Hope Lutheran in De Pere, we are meeting countless people who show God's love daily but I am frequently reminded of my dear friends in Edgar, WI at St. John Lutheran Church who continually amaze me with their open, caring and loving nature. While my husband was still the pastor at St. John their Sunday School classes supported our adoption in many ways . . . the least not being through prayer. Even this month, with us no longer a physical part of their congregation, they are STILL supporting our adoption. What an amazing gift God has given us and the people of central Wisconsin!

Please pray for these awesome Christians, for their continued blessings and support and as they call a new pastor to serve their congregation.

Philippians 1.3-6  

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 

THANK YOU TO ALL OF YOU AT ST. JOHN LUTHERAN CHURCH

AND

PRAISE BE TO GOD!

Let's try this again

In my last post I mentioned that my husband had received a call to another congregation. After much prayer and thought he accepted it. We are now at Hope Lutheran Church in De Pere, WI. We moved here on April 17 and after some unpacking and many of us getting sick with the flu we are now moving forward again with our adoption. We are still working with LSS and CHSFS. However, instead of working with the Wausau office of LSS we will now be working with the Appleton office. 

In the next few weeks we hope to complete the paperwork for the next round of background checks. Since we just moved to a new county and city we must have background checks provided for those locations. After that is completed we will finally move forward with the rest of our homestudy.

I know that I have not been all that great with posting here in the last three months or so but that is about to change....I have made the commitment to post here once a week by Friday.

Adoptive Families the Norm for Christian Families

So I'm reading the book "Passing On the Faith," by Merton P. Strommen and Richard A. Hardel in preparation for a class I'm going to teach at Concordia University- Wisconsin (pretty good read, by the way... if you're at all involved in family ministry or in ensuring that the children of your congregation are raised in the faith).  I'm not very far into it yet, but the first chapter talks a lot about how strong, life-changing families need to build and maintain two key relationship- a strong family relationship and a strong relationship with God.  The argument is that these relationships are two sides of the same coin and that the church needs to help families to encourage and support this sort of faith formation in the home.  The chapter then goes on to try and define what family is (you have to decide on what family "is" before you can try and address how to help it!).  It was in this context, then, that I came across this throwaway paragraph that speaks strongly to the notion of adoptive familes as normative for the definition of a Christian family:

As the first and most basic community, the family acts as a model for other, larger faith-learning communities. Diana Garland, director of the Family Ministry Project located at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in Kentucky, defines family. According to her, the model of family that Jesus endorses is the adoptive family. The last act of Jesus' earthly ministry recorded in the Gospel of John enacts that adoptive model. Jesus turns to his mother and says, "Woman, behold your son." Then turning to the beloved disciple he says, "Behold your mother." The Church follows Christ by ensuring that no one in the family of faith is familyless- everyone is adopted into the family."                                        (revised edition,  2008,  p.23).

Not only do I agree wholeheartedly with this quote from Diana Garland, but I think it strikes right to the heart of what Maggie and I wish to do.  Although I believe Garland's intention was to state that the congregation itself functions as a family of believers, thereby ensuring that no one in the congregation be "familyless," still I think it speaks to our domestic families as well.  After all, it seems pretty clear that God is calling Christians to reach out in Christ-like love to many types of needy people- orphans being (if not foremost) at least prominent in that group.

God is speaking to His people through His Word, calling us to love one another as Christ has loved us (1 John 4:19),  the question for us is: are we listening?